Frontier: I figured out why people keep saying the game is a grind...please read.

[Raidiant]

Hi it finally dawned on me why there seems to be a endless amount of things to do in Elite, yet none of them feel satisfactory, its bugged me for a while that there is a lot to do in Elite but why does everyone complain it being grindy?

The reason is simple. Elite never gives the player a "win".

No matter what you do you never get a "thank you" from the game.

No matter how many ships you kill in a conflict zone, you cannot end the conflict, the conflict just goes on even if you brought a wing of 4 friends to defeat the other side.

You cannot win saving miners from pirates at RES points, no matter how many pirates you kill the only thing you get is money, nobody says thanks, you can't "clear out" a RES point. There is no ultimate reward like other games, where you are told you have achieved certain things.

No matter how many times you donate to systems, or how many luxuries or food you give to "seeking food, luxuries, the fleets stay there forever and ever.

If you beat another power's players in a opposing system you cannot affect or win the system over, there is no reward for fighting in what you believe in. You cannot win again.

No matter how many merits you win or grind, nothing is permanent and things just decay. You do not get a title for doing 1000 merits in the game.

The journey is its own reward maybe, but after a while the mind just figures out that nothing in the end changes. All players want for the end of a days work is a pat on the back, a well done kind of feeling - that what they did mattered. Now I don't mean that players need to feel special. I just mean players need to feel like they can "achieve" something in the game other than just get more credits.

This isn't hard to implement, the mechanics for the game are all already there. All players need to feel is that they can win everynow and then and get rewarded by the game in some manner for completing a LARGER BIG PICTURE OBJECTIVE, whether in the form of change, money, items, achievements, titles.

Bump or comment if you can get behind this change in design direction.

 

[X-Terminator]

Only children need treats for completing stuff but treat them as adults and they grow up sooner. We only need to feel when we've had enough to try something different. However, it's another step into the unknown and just like fleas/sheep we like to keep cotton buds in our ears and stay safe. If you get WANTED in a home ground then it's good enough reason to set off and do something else. It may be just the 1 week asylum but by then you've calmed down and seen another way of playing.

 

[Asp Explorer]

You can't win Elite.

 

[Raidiant]

You can't win Elite.

Yes, but what I am saying is something should happen after you and your friends kill 100 ships of the opposing fact in a conflict zone. Notice I didn't say win, i said "a win" .

 

[Katkon]

You can't win Elite.

I win Elite every time I play. But that's because I'm a born winner. And extremely handsome. Some would say I'm the most handsome bounty hunter in all the Galaxy. That's a "win" in and of itself.

 

[Asp Explorer]

I win Elite every time I play. But that's because I'm a born winner. And extremely handsome. Some would say I'm the most handsome bounty hunter in all the Galaxy. That's a "win" in and of itself.

Yup - playing Elite end enjoying your time playing is a win in-and-of-itself. It's the entire point of the game, to be a fun experience when you play it. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

[Captain Willard]

I win Elite every time I play. .

My hero. That sez it all

 

[X-Terminator]

I win Elite every time I play. But that's because I'm a born winner. And extremely handsome. Some would say I'm the most handsome bounty hunter in all the Galaxy. That's a "win" in and of itself.

OMG we are so similar, I look in the mirror everyday and say "handsome b........(word for man without a daddy)". Seriously, my gf always gets me to say it when she not hears it!
Winning always - well we never die in ED anyway.

 

[Katkon]

Yup - playing Elite end enjoying your time playing is a win in-and-of-itself. It's the entire point of the game, to be a fun experience when you play it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Did I mention that I'm handsome? H A N D S O M E. I think that also has something to do with it....

Joking aside.... OP: you're right that you can't win Elite on a macro scale. But you can progress in rank, reputation, ships, equipment and credits. You can also "win" missions, but they're really just a means to some of the above. Playing (and contributing) really is it's own reward. Personally, I'm glad there is no "end" or "win" as it increases longevity of the game for me personally. You are of course welcome (and encouraged) to set your own goals.

 

[daygobah]

Ya thats not a bad idea. BUt here is my problem. with the game that makes it a grind.

Say yes you kill off 100 ships at a RES location. YOu would think the bad guys would stop sending ships or at least send in 3-4 condas to take you out.

The over all AI sucks right now. And the NPC AI or pirates AI sucks.

 

[Raidiant]

Only children need treats for completing stuff but treat them as adults and they grow up sooner. We only need to feel when we've had enough to try something different. However, it's another step into the unknown and just like fleas/sheep we like to keep cotton buds in our ears and stay safe. If you get WANTED in a home ground then it's good enough reason to set off and do something else. It may be just the 1 week asylum but by then you've calmed down and seen another way of playing.

Well I certainly don't endorse the game being an achievement driven game. If players felt like they can do complete something than they are likely to seek something else to do.

Don't get me wrong. I love Elite, but my issue with the game currently is that there is no reason to do anything else but trading, because the game is money orientated, the only real thing you can change is the amount in your bank balance (though I also think that is a problem). It's not the fact that combat/pirating/exploring doesn't bring about any money, its the fact that combat has no real purpose but to get combat bonds, for example if you defeat a capital ship it just come back if you jump out and jumps back in. You can't permanently stop or affect anything.

A good example is exploration data - what happens when you hand in all that data? there is no difference whether you hand in 1 black hole data, or 10 black hole data, it makes no difference whether you have been to a nebulae or not, whatever you do the only thing that can happen is you get wanted, blown up by another player, die etc.

 

[CMDR Endincite]

This is actually fairly smart psychology.
"Only children need a treat for completing stuff"... fine, but everyone, research suggests, responds to this. Reinforcing a sense of accomplishment is standard business psychology, and businesspeople are very similar to adults in many ways.

It can either be taken too far, or not. And once again the game would get either better or worse.

 

[danbit5]

no point firing a missile when your over the event horizon ,but once get planetry landings on this version and turrets on ships and external views world will feel cosy again,almost hear the wind blowing ,was it a ross station in sol?amigo version guys started off on. did any one else do the neil Armstrong when they mastered manual flight,wow and soon discovered some planets when went mining tugged you in like a stone,needed to counter the landings by pushing the thrusters harder,some planets gravity that low seemed to be bumping needed to plug thursters down lol(old days the ai was really smart went of on a contract and arrived early by 5mins waiting for target to leave a station,hovering above place looking down mr orange wil be leaving at xyz time see a few cobras and imperials,i use to challenge myself not to be brought in by police ,just allow them to get as far up in atmosphere before police or they could hyper out,some really classy battles on planets they made me crash a few into the planet but mostly I scared them that much they crashed them selfs and I got bountyno police record no need to hyper(and only 1 missile was used in disposing of that panther clipper,good old days)

 

[Brimstone]

I think the new notifications with the animations for ranking up your combat, exploration, or trading ranks is a good step in the right direction for this. I felt like I had accomplished and won something when I got one for gaining an exploration rank.

Right now when you complete bulletin board missions, It feels very mechanical. There is no "thank you" or "great job" from the 'person' that handed you the mission in the first place, just some progress bar showing how that mission affected your reputation and the influence of that faction. Little touches like " thank you's" whether you complete a mission or destroy a pirate harassing traders or miners in a USS or RES would make a big difference.

 

[Raidiant]

Try powerplay. you can win when you undermine a system. You can win when you fortify a system. Yeah I agree there's no fanfare and parade. But can take a deep breath and say, "I did that".

Here is a good example, we sent out multiple wings to Kalana to blockage the feds from undermining the system, but we can't do anything apart from lose credits over blown up ships, at the end of the day the most effective way is to just all go solo, and "fast track" as much money as possible to the system. There is also no incentive for someone to wait for 25 items every half hour, when you can just buy your inlfluence in that system, of which the money is most likely made from trading using thrudds tool.

 

[X-Terminator]

This is actually fairly smart psychology.
"Only children need a treat for completing stuff"... fine, but everyone, research suggests, responds to this. Reinforcing a sense of accomplishment is standard business psychology, and businesspeople are very similar to adults in many ways.

It can either be taken too far, or not. And once again the game would get either better or worse.

I am a businessman. I am a director of my own company. I teach other people in my business. I have always taught everybody to think for themselves and they can choose to set goals. It creates great stress in doing so but it gets their lazy hinds over the fence! But they will always need hand holding and shown the way forward. You gotta swim in the deep end to learn to swim. Even when you're the boss you still must take all the crap that bounces back from all those who let you down and hold you back. To survive I don't need candy. 'Cos there's no end to the struggles in business. It still goes on.
Just a man on the road with no end...always another hill at the top of the rise...

 

[Kookas]

I'm thinking it would be really cool if conflicts had battles, which were won when a side lost a certain number of ships. These would pop up often enough that there's always at least one in a civil war system. Then some way of seeing how many battles each side had won and how many are needed for a side to win the war overall.

 

[obliterator]

Yeah I'm all for the "you can't win in elite" argument, but the man's got a point: endless conflict zones are silly. There is no sense of completion anywhere. I would really love to be able to witness the beginning and the end of a battle, but right now we only get to see the middle.

 

[Eric Sheppard]

Hate to burst your bubble, OP, but that's not why many of us think Elite is a grind at all. It's because once you've figured out combat, trading, exploring, and mining, there's nothing left to do. Absolutely nothing. The only goal you can set for yourself is to get the best available ship in the game, an Anaconda, and outfit it. Then do the exact same thing you just spent hundreds and hundreds of hours grinding for, just in a bigger, more expensive ship. It's soul-numbing and worse than unsatisfying, it's downright depressing. That there's nothing meaningful to strive towards in Elite that either reflects individual playstyles or makes up an enjoyable endgame, and that the universe doesn't feel so much as a living, breathing Milky Way as a visually-represented spreadsheet.

 

[Raidiant]

Underneath this problem of reward too, is the fact that something like pirating should be rewarding and have impact of the system, but it doesn't have neither. It would be cool for example for the system to increase police presence when too much crime is present, so players have to move to other systems, wait for it too cool down, or find more people to create more havoc.

There is an imbalance for example in trade, you can basically make the most amount of money just finding route using thrudds tool and grind those routes, there is no incentive to try other routes or do rares trading beyond a certain point, surely there has to be some appreciation for lavian brandy delivered from the other side of the galaxy. The difference is ridiculous when you look at the figures, you can easily make 200k from a trading roundtrip on 100 ton of cargo, but it will take you a long time to earn the same amount of money in RES or conflict sites, and even less pirating, and even less exploring, which makes no sense because exploration is much more harder, how could delivering palladium be worth than much more than the data of a black hole??

In powerplay for example, even if you kill alot of rival powers in your HQ, where they constantly interdict players you cannot change their frequency.